Fortran returns to top 20 TIOBE index

We discussed this already in this thread. There might be better measures for language popularity, but this thread seems to specially focus on the TIOBE index. To discuss other metrics on Fortran I would recommend to create a new thread to keep this one on topic.

I think the comment below is still an apt summary

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With modern Fortran, I personally think the situation is truly that of unrealized potential.

And with just a few more facilities toward practicing Fortran, especially Generics, a bit more refined control of run-time exceptions particularly with the use of FUNCTION subprograms, and a few languages goodies, and improvements in the ecosystem - all of which help develop powerful libraries that can serve robustly for decades and decades - modern Fortran can potentially see exponential growth in consumption in many domains and platforms including cloud and mobile that have long overlooked this venerable language only because of unfavorable impressions with FORTRAN.

The above advancements can permanently place modern Fortran truly where it belongs which is in the very top echelon of any language index, TIOBE or any other.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Support for plotting data in Fortran

Here is the 2022 TIOBE data for Fortran, from @nbehrnd

|month |% |rank|
|2022-01|0.77|19|
|2022-02|0.58|23|
|2022-03|0.39|30|
|2022-04|0.35|31|
|2022-05|0.38|30|
|2022-06|0.55|26|
|2022-07|0.76|18|
|2022-08|0.81|19|
|2022-09|1.03|15|
|2022-10|0.79|19|
|2022-11|0.57|24|
|2022-12|0.43|26|

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Just for the record:
Position #17 in March 2023, ratings 0.79%.

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So Fortran is coming back in the Top 20 one or two times per year.

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With a bit of vision and just a few more features introduced into the language, Fortran can permanently reside in the Top 10 and more importantly be seen as the lingua franca of scientific and technical computing.

With the teams I work with where there are stalwarts in modern C++, Python, etc., almost everyone I have come across have been very impressed by modern Fortran whenever I have had a chance to walk through snippets of modern Fortran code with them e.g., along the likes of the example here.

The problem has always been a few rough edges (why implicit none everywhere, why default kinds of single precision, etc.), some missing features in the language (why no intrinsic string type, why no unsigned integers, etc.) - all toward some “creature comfort” and/or interoperability, and an ecosystem toward productive practice.

LFortran with @certik et al is the only vision I notice that can make a truly fundamental advance to build on the work by @certik, @milancurcic , @everythingfunctional , et al. with the Community, fpm, etc.

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I have quickly plotted the Fortran rank using @nbehrnd file:

If we arbitrarily start from the birth of the Fortran Discourse (May 2020), the mean rank is \approx 25 and the standard deviation is \approx 8.8.

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According to this message, Fortran would be at the rank #17 with ~13k GitHub repositories:

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Well that’s only true if you ignore the languages that have more uses than fortran that weren’t included in this list such as Scala 113k, Lua 94k, haskel 70k, Dart 19k, Kotlin 15k, PHP 14.1k, Julia 14.1k, VisualBasic, 13.2k.

Also the stats seem to fluctuate a bit.

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Thanks for correcting the facts. I was a little astonished, that’s why I wrote “according to” :sweat_smile:

But above all, Fortran is far behind R (262k repos) and MATLAB (111k)…

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As previously mentioned, TIOBE rankings are dubious, although I write about them too. Looking at the March 2023 rankings, I don’t believe that

13 Delphi/Object Pascal
15 Classic Visual Basic

have brighter futures than

16 R
17 Fortran
18 Ruby
19 Rust

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I think that all languages with a ratings around or below 1% are in the noise. The top of the index is relatively stable (ratings ~10%), the bottom is changing all the time…

I don’t know what they name “Classic Visual Basic” because according to Wikipedia the final release was in 1998 and the Microsoft support ended in 2008… It’s true that VB was cool, and it popularized GUI programming in the 90’s.

Wikipedia says:

Although vendor support for Visual Basic 6 has ended, and the product has never been supported on the latest versions of Windows, key parts of the environment still work on newer platforms. It is possible to get a subset of the development environment working on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11.

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Everytime Fortran makes any list, it’s a big success. I think it is true that there is still a lot of bias against Fortran, unlike almost any other language, except perhaps Lisp. So even if the list is unfair to languages that didn’t make it, I think I will take it. :slight_smile:

Fortran is regularly featured in articles such as

Top 10 Programming Languages Beginners Should Stop Learning in 2023

Top 10 Programming Languages That You Should Avoid in 2023 (inaccurate statements about Fortran)

which does not help.

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The first compilation is odd. The title states “stay away from these languages”, yet the individual sections advertise them. Tidbits I take away (occasionally added emphasis absent in the original):

CoffeeScript is a simple programming language […] for sophisticated object-oriented programming.

[Ruby] runs on all types of platforms

[…] Objective-C is a small but powerful set of extensions to the standard ANSI C programming language […]

Haskell is a modern, standard, purely functional programming language […]

or

Fortran is an imperative programming language with widespread applications in science, particularly in computational physics, computational fluid dynamics, and numerical weather prediction.

Please read this one: “Top 10 New Programming Languages to Overtake Python in 5 Years” (December 2022)
(voluntarily broken link) :/top-10-new-programming-languages-to-overtake-python-in-5-years/

These 10 “new programming languages” are Java, R, SQL, Assembly language, CSS, Ruby, C/C++, JavaScript, C#, React. :face_with_spiral_eyes: :face_with_raised_eyebrow: :grimacing:

The developers have to be updated with all these latest trends and indices to stay relevant in the tech market. The programming and developer communities are emerging faster than ever before. Here are the top 10 new programming languages to overtake Python.

Was it generated by a junkie ChatGPT? :disguised_face:

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds! :gem:

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Fortran is also listed in:
(voluntarily broken link) /top-10-drone-languages-that-developers-should-learn-in-2022/
(voluntarily broken link) /top-10-programming-languages-that-spacex-uses-to-program-rockets/
(voluntarily broken link) /top-10-programming-languages-that-could-leave-you-jobless-in-2023/

A schizophrenic chatGPT?

With that, let’s not post any more analytics insights articles here. It’s obviously spam used to generate clicks.

(GPT-4 generates much better written and more meaningful articles than this :slightly_smiling_face:)

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I have broken the links in my posts to avoid generating more clicks there…

Hum… I think they have forgotten Fortran in the list of New Programming Languages to Overtake Python in 5 Years. :smile: But of course the Top 1 is CSS… :rofl:

So, I have just realized I could become rich using fastGPT to generate an AI generated website… Bye bye science! :grin:

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